When Under Lock and Key
by AerrowLover
Summary: ."It is too easy to lose yourself." After being locked up for thirty years, Adam Monroe realises that the easiest way to be broken is by his own cursed memories. And as an immortal of nearly four hundred years, doesn't he have many of them.


**A/N: ****I know - I'm back to Heroes for yet another One-Shot. I'm terrible. :face palm:  
I told myself that "Pathetic Fallacy" would be the last One-Shot until I posted my multi-chaptered fic, "It's Never Too Late", but oh no, my mind wouldn't stop thinking about a certain immortal, and what it was like to be locked up. Flipping heck - I'm obsessed.**

**Disclaimer:**** You all know the drill - I don't own anything to do with Heroes. I only pretend to own Adam Monroe…Sadly.**

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**~When Under Lock and Key~  
**_  
it is too easy to lose yourself._

* * *

After the first ten years, he believes that "they" have now forgotten him and left him to rot.

He spends those days reading, eating, exercising (by doing push-ups and sit-ups), sleeping…The usual routine. Trying to imagine what might have happened if his plan had succeeded - who would have lived and who would have died? Chance and fate... The two things that hate him. How deliciously lovely they are when deciding people's lives.

It is also a pleasure to plot the demise of those who had locked him up, and obviously thrown away the shiny key. So late at night when he gets into the army-style bed placed in his cell, just before he closes his eyes to sleep, he makes it a ritual to plan yet another slow death for those that have done this to him.

When he sleeps, he thinks back to the long lost days of old when he had lived in so many places and been so many things. The first case of that had been as a samurai in Feudal Japan, after surviving a particularly appalling trip over the sea from England - his place of birth. The place he hadn't seen for…Well, he no longer keeps a firm hold on time, or track of the years that pass so slowly on some occasions, and so quickly on others.

His memories - and how many there were of those - are his only companions. He makes the long dead live again. He makes those far away be near him. His cell is no longer empty apart from him, but full and bright with all kinds of faces.

But one memory sticks out with more intensity than the others. And this was a memory he longs not to have with him; longs not to see. He sees a round-faced man with glasses looking at him so forlornly, and also with such passionate hate.

He always tries to ignore it; ignore him. He tries so hard, but the man keeps coming back.

He wakes up shivering whenever the man appears in his dreams. He never fails to glance around the empty room, looking for him. He knows it is stupid - there is nothing there - but he still does it.

And with the man comes several more silent and angry looking figures, all constantly staring at him with hate in their eyes. They attack his once-peaceful dreams during his sleep, and seem to linger on when he wakes up.

He always sighs and gets up afterwards. Yet he can't ignore that urge to look over his shoulder; can't ignore that sickening and sinking feeling in the base of his stomach. The feeling that makes his heart speed up and his breathing rushed and ragged.

He runs his hands through his hair. His shaking hands through his hair, that is.

How his memories haunt him.

* * *

After another ten years, they come back to haunt him more and more. It has now also become more obvious that he has been left here to rot.

He has difficulty, such difficulty in believing that it had come to this - he, the one who had lived for nearly four hundred years in most countries in the world now restricted to an eight by eight cell. In America too, of all places.

_The so-called "Land of the Free." _

And by those he had helped.

He laughs bitterly. He should have known that this would be how it would end - him, the teacher locked up and forgotten about by his own pupils. Talk about gratitude.

Or maybe it's poetic justice? He is not too sure. But the point still stands - he has been locked away and forgotten about by those he had helped for god knows how long.

And just because he wanted to cleanse the world and make a new one. One with no poverty or sickness, one with no "villains"… Well, maybe his methods were harsh - wiping out how much the world's population, again? - but they would have worked, he knew. He also knew that the world was now only going to get steadily worse.

After being around for as long as he had, he knew history repeated itself. There would be more wars, more genocides. More epidemics and more famines. The rich would stay rich and the poor would stay poor. however, maybe history could repeat itself in a good fashion - let him somehow be set free...

Soon those who had been so furious at his actions - his failed attempts - would realise that he had been right. Right all along. And then they would unlock his cell, let him out, and he could fulfil his dreams and create a new and beautiful world.

And everyone would know that they had been saved by him. He would be hailed as a God among mere mortals. All would look up to him and beg his forgiveness.

He thinks constantly of that, but still - those memories keeps coming back. Over and over and over again. The dreams are now plagued and he feels diseased, almost. Maybe the succession of sleepless nights are catching up on him? He shakes his head. But-

It's not because of that, and oh, how he knows it.

He swears that he sees people walk about the room, and not just whenever he wakes up. The people that he has hurt, in someway or another. The people that he cannot think about without a faint tinge of guilt that he always tries so hard to ignore. Those whom he abandoned or neglected...

He knows he has to get out. He _needs,_ with such hopeless longing, to get out. Somehow he has too. Or else… he shakes his head, frantic. Trying to stop the screams coming from inside it from actually be released from his own pleading mouth.

Another glance about the room. Another look over his shoulder.

_Are they here...?_

Or else he doesn't think he'll be the same man that was locked up, now twenty years ago.

* * *

After thirty years, he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was going to spend his remaining years (and oh, how many there were of those, too) locked up in this sterile and cramped cell.

People come and go, as always - bringing in trays of food and maybe the odd new book or two - but that has been it. Nothing else. No one else.

In a way, he is faintly surprised. He would have expected someone to come and mock him; to proclaim something like "How the mighty have fallen!" He knows, deep down, that if the roles had been reversed he would be doing something like that. Maybe they know that about him. Know that he then would hate the opposite. Maybe they think he would love the attention it brought, no matter how.

He laughs again with such bitterness, yet he knows it resembles more of a sob. It doesn't care for attention - he just needs to see something or someone. Something to prove that he hasn't gone mad. He needs to see life.

Needs to see something - _anything_- that's alive.

So nothing has been said to him. He has become completely and utterly unwanted - something to sigh when thought about - and he knows that this is the punishment intended for him.

When he was first placed in this cell, he had laughed, thinking how stupid the punishment sentenced to him had been. Locked up? Not killed? The fools didn't know what to do - they had been so used to him giving orders that when the tables had turned and they had been left leaderless, they couldn't cope.

Or so he had thought.

Because then, as the days turned to weeks, the weeks turned to months and the months to years he then came to understand how perfect the punishment was. Solitary confinement was more painful and more torturous than anything else he had ever experienced.

He now knows that they had been right when they said it was a fate worse than death. It was, and especially for someone like him.

He sees people from his mind; his memories all the time now. They look at him and say nothing. They just _stare_. It makes him feel panicked and although whenever those who come to deliver the trays of food come and see him and think him his usual - his _old_- charming and arrogant self, he knows that he is anything but.

The dreams have become nightmares. The nightmares have become real. Sleep terrifies him.

He tries reading instead, more and more often but it is only a temporary place of refuge and solace. For whenever he lifts his head he sees _them._

Or he hears them. They never speak, but he can still hear them. And then he slams the book shut and looks around, and then suddenly there is no sound; there is nothing there.

He sobs then, holding his head in his hands. He sobs and rocks himself back and forth on his bed, moaning and begging them all to go away.

To please just go away…

Sometimes they do take pity, or so it seems, for they vanish and leave him in peace, letting those tears fall down his face.

But sometimes they don't, and they crowd around him, coming in closer and closer and closer. They smile, horrible twisted smiles. The noise suddenly becomes so loud and so unbearable and they reach out and then -

He screams, loud screams that can't be heard by any as he is hidden so far away from the real world.

So he screams and then he cries harder for he knows now that he has been broken. Not by instruments of torture or by words. No, not by them at all. He has been broken by his own cursed memories - the ones that used to provide comfort to him back in the early days of his confinement. But the tables have turned on him yet again and so have the figments of his imagination.

In sheer desperation he starts trying to kill himself. Hopeless, he knows - isn't he a bloody immortal? - but he tries anyway. He tries so hard to get away from it and he does anything - purposely breaking his own neck, biting his own wrists to bleed to death - to get a few moments of blissful nothingness where he can be safe.

Yet he always ends up coming back to this hell that has been created by him with blood on his clothes and tears on his face.

He doesn't know what is real anymore. All he knows is that he has lost everything, _everything_… And become a shell of the man he once was.

And late at night, when he huddles in the small uncomfortable bed against the stark white wall and when he sees those…things come back and stand around him, grinning relentlessly at his pain, it is then that Adam Monroe knows he will never escape.

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**Help me. I've lost it. I'm like poor Adam…No idea where this came from, either. Please review - it may help save my sanity.**


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